Dogshit take, tbh. Begging the question, analogy so stretched it's taffy.
Your position boils down to disagreeing with OPs conclusion that IP law violation isn't the same category as theft in a legal sense, or in the material sense.
The counterargument you pose gives as an example a clear case of material and legal thievery.
Materially speaking, labor creates value, and wage theft is not compensating that labor what is promised. Value has thus been extracted from one party without mutual consent and mutual gain. Theft of physical property is also the extraction of value from one party without mutual consent and gain. One uses the power imbalance between employer and employee, the other uses larceny. The result is the same.
Legally speaking, extracting goods or services from an individual under false pretenses (promise of compensation) is fraud. Fraud is a form of theft and is prosecuted in criminal law.
Holding IP rights in-and-off-itself does not create value. In fact, IP rights is a means of production! IP can be used by laborers (e.g. film crews) to create art, which has value.
The IP rights holder then demands rent — a cut of the profits — in exchange for allowing the laborers to use the IP.
Holding the legal right to IP is possession of private property and the primary way to profit off of IP rights is rent extraction.
Copying of the art created using IP does not deprive the IP rights holder of any value because the IP rights holder does not labor and creates no value, only extracts rent.
Legally speaking, IP rights violations are prosecuted in contract and tort law, according to "lost business profit" — for instance if a company A fails to deliver dohickeys on time or of a requisite quality, which causes another company B to fail to fullfil their orders of thingamabobs to 500 customers and B has to pay penalties for failing to deliver, B can name A's failure to deliver on a contract as responsible for their loss. (The failure to deliver is contract law, the damages of lost business is tort.)
IP rights holders prosecute pirates according to this doctrine, claiming that N thousand downloads of film F times M dollars of profit per sale of a copy of F is a real number of dollars that they are entitled to in lost business damages.
Science, however, directly proves otherwise, according to a report commissioned by the EU in 2013, which found that people pirating movies either never ever buy any movies (no intent to buy = no lost profit) or very often go on to actually purchase when they otherwise wouldn't have (i.e. it is free advertising.) The report concluded that piracy is actually beneficial to IP rights holders.
IP rights enforcement is enforcement of private property rights, by the state, to protect the interests of renters. It had been used to put people into eternal indentured servitude, send people to prison, and prevent owners of technological devices from repairing their rightfully purchased physical goods. (Like farmers being banned from repairing their own farming equipment, leading to grain rotting in the field.)
So please, alkatyn, explain to me why wage theft isn't theft or, conversely, why IP rights violation is theft.
